Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it.

Too many people owe him now, Case. Maybe you get to be the example. You seriously better watch it. Sure. How about you, Linda?

By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky. Two blocks west of the Chat, in a teashop called the Jarre de The, Case washed down the night's first pill with a double espresso.

But she left. Jesus, Case said, what kind a creep joint you running here? Man can't have a drink. Ha, Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, Zone shows a percentage.

A thief he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.

I saw your girl last night, Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin. I don't have one, he said, and drank. Miss Linda Lee. Case shook his head.

Because-still smiling-they were going to make sure he never worked again. They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.

It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency. It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin.

He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street, and he had a reputation for being able to get whatever you wanted. A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time.

Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders.

In Chiba, he'd watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month round of examinations and consultations. The men in the black clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which he'd been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads. Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn't see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies.

New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her mouth.

So you vanish, okay? Zone, he's a close personal friend of mine. She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible spitting sound, her lips barely moving.

The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat.